Chants and Chanteys
by DezoPenguin
Summary: A sea voyage! Mysterious disappearances! On mission for the Royal Magicians, Lillet and Amoretta have a mystery of magic, monsters, and music to solve o'er the bounding waves.
1. Chapter 1

"The sea is so beautiful!"

Amoretta Virgine pushed away from the galleon's rail and spun around in her joy, her long, ash-blonde hair streaming out around her head in the sea wind. Lillet Blan had to agree with her; it _was_ a lovely day at sea, with a bright sun in the sky amid scattered fluffy clouds, colors mirrored in slightly darker hues below by the deep sapphire-blue water and the white canvas sails rippling in the steady following wind. To her, though, it was Amoretta herself, with that delighted smile on her face, who was the most beautiful thing in her sight.

"Thank you so much for sharing this with me, Lillet. Did you know that it would be like this?"

"No, I've never been to sea before, so it's my first time seeing it, too. I'd never even visited a port city."

Amoretta wrinkled her nose.

"That, on the other hand, was not beautiful, and ugh, the _smell_. I think it was worse than the capital at highsummer."

"I don't know; the palace is pretty far from the riverfront and I understand it can be pretty awful, but you're probably right; the sewers even run to the Old City, while the harbor in Mistral is not so clean. Especially when you can't always tell the smell of the fresh fish from that of the rotting fish." Lillet, it will be noted, had grown up on a farm, so the only fish she was familiar with came out of the nearby creek. "But now that we're out here on the ocean, this is amazing."

The merchantman was laden with cargo, but with full sail and a favoring wind she was making excellent speed, the water rushing past and the breeze swirling around them. The wind tugged at Lillet's dress, and would have likely taken her steeple hat from her head had it not been charmed to stay in place. She came up to the rail alongside Amoretta and leaned up against it, folding her arms across the top. Amoretta stood next to her, coming up close enough to press her upper arm against Lillet's, the contact warm even through her sleeves.

"Ah, look there!"

Lillet followed the direction of her pointing finger. It was just a glimmer at first, then grew into a wide-winged seabird, brilliant white like an angel's pinions. It seemed to be drifting on the wind, yet somehow at the same time was soaring boldly, commanding the air beneath it. There was a nobility to the sight, balanced against something delicate, even fragile, like a wisp of cloud that could shatter into a thousand fragments with a puff of air.

"Magnificent," Lillet breathed. "There's something about the ocean, these hundreds of empty miles with no place to light, and yet it crosses them as easily as a fish swims them."

"I wonder what it's called."

"An…albatross, I think? I'm not sure. I'll have to look it up; I think there should be something in the natural sciences section in the Royal House of Magic's library." Lillet chuckled as a thought hit her. "Do you know, I'd almost rather not know. There's just something about it, soaring free like that, that seems as if putting a name to it would be chaining it here to our mundane reality."

Amoretta giggled, a musical ring to the sound.

"Lillet, I really don't understand you sometimes. You're a _magician_; your reality is anything but mundane—and that's just a pretty bird."

"Some days, little love," Lillet laughed, "I don't think you have a poetic bone in your body."

"I do have trouble with metaphor," Amoretta agreed. She was as honest about her own shortcomings as she was about everything else. "I don't think I'd be a very good poet."

"Well, there's a place for a woman who tells the direct truth instead of using words like a spider's web. Leave the clever deceptions to Mr. Advocat," Lillet said, then reached out and covered Amoretta's hand with her own where it sat on the rail.

"Thank you, Lillet."

They stood for a quiet moment, enjoying each other's company and the crisp sea air, finding companionable silence despite the rush of wind, the flap of the sails, the creak of wood and lines. Then, Amoretta broke that silence, not by speaking, but by raising her voice into song. The tune was new to Lillet; in fact, it was a sea chantey the sailors had been singing while preparing to set sail back in Mistral. As usual, Amoretta had precisely memorized both the tune and the lyrics at a single hearing. Lillet still broke into laughter before the second verse, though, at the incongruity of "The Merry Mary Rose" sung in a voice that could have graced an angelic chorus.

_Literally_, Lillet thought between chortles at Amoretta's musical idealization of the charms of a pirate wench. After all, in an attempt to build the ultimate homunculus, Dr. Chartreuse had crafted her artificial life around the core of an actual angel, and she could definitely sing like one, even if her choice of music was decidedly more human in its tastes.

She stopped abruptly halfway through the third verse, though, and turned to Lillet, wrinkling her nose in thought.

"Lillet, what did that last line mean?"

"What? Oh, sorry, I was too busy chuckling, so I'm a couple of lines behind."

Amoretta repeated the line, spoken instead of sung, and Lillet felt her cheeks flush. Royal Magician she might be, but she was also still an eighteen-year-old girl and one from a respectable peasant background.

"Um, that is…I'll tell you later, in private."

"All right." Amoretta shrugged. She was all but shameless herself (since she avoided saying or doing things she would feel ashamed of, and she didn't really have a sense of embarrassment), but had come to understand that humans were different in that regard and was adept enough at reading the signs.

_For that matter, she'll probably figure out what the line means just because I _am _so embarrassed_, Lillet thought.

Amoretta had just opened her mouth to continue the song when she was cut off by the sound of heavy boots on the deck behind them.

"Well, then, ladies," boomed a hearty voice, "how are you enjoying the voyage? Have your sea legs yet?"

"Quite well, Mr. Limoux," Lillet said. "It's the first time on a ship for either of us, and we were just talking about how much we were enjoying ourselves."

"And the motion is no worse than a carriage," Amoretta added.

"Don't even get me started about how much worse it is on dragonback!" Lillet said. "Though it's such a nice day, I'm sure the ship is at its kindest. I wouldn't want to imagine what sailing through a storm would be like."

Gerard Limoux nodded firmly. "Oh, yes, indeed. When I was a young man I worked the Rouge Island run. One year when I was serving on the _Arrow_ we got a late start on account of half the crew being laid up with the yellow fever and we didn't clear the archipelago before the first good blow of gale season. Don't know how any man-jack of us lived through that, let alone brought the _Arrow_ through safe and sound. St. Elmo must have been smiling on us that day, for sure."

The bluff smile dropped from the merchant's face, as if the recollection of past risks and adventures brought him back around to awareness of his present situation. He popped open a silver snuffbox, took a pinch and inhaled with a loud sniff, then smoothed down his russet moustache with a bent knuckle. Emeralds glittered from rings on Limoux's first and pinky fingers with each movement of his hand.

"But you should come with me, and I can explain to you the reason that I requested for assistance from the Royal House of Magic."

"Thank you; I think that would be a good idea."

He led them across the deck towards the stern of the ship and through a door which led to a luxurious cabin. The aft was fixed with glass windows—not portholes, but actual windows—looking out from the stern of the vessel, and while the size of the room was cramped the bedstead, sideboard, table, and chairs were all of fine craftsmanship, the kind that would have graced a noble's home on land.

Lillet already knew that Limoux was extremely wealthy; the _St. Julien_ was only one of a dozen ships that he owned, and that he had political influence was made plain by the fact that Master Freixenet, director of the Royal House of Magic, had sent Lillet to help Limoux with his problem without even knowing what that problem was—or at least if he did know, he hadn't told Lillet anything beyond the fact that it would involve a sea voyage.

"Please, have a seat," he invited. Lillet held Amoretta's chair for her, then sat down herself. Limoux settled himself at what was clearly the head of the table, and then continued. "I've heard your name, Mistress Blan. Defeating the Archmage set quite the tone, and then there have been plenty of other rumors about the fine work you've been doing." He lifted a letter from a stack of papers and gestured with it. "Master Freixenet speaks quite highly of your abilities. I trust that you'll be able to put paid to my little problem—though it's not so little as that, especially for the people involved."

Lillet thought better of the merchant for that addendum.

"I hope that I can, although it would have been easier to say if anyone had told me what the problem _was_, so that I could properly prepare. I brought along my traveling grimoire, of course, and I also borrowed 'Neptune,' a Glamour grimoire focused on aquatic familiars, from the Royal House of Magic's library, so I do have some resources on hand." She patted her satchel with the books. "I still would have appreciated specifics."

Limoux nodded at her.

"I wish that I could have been more explicit, but I couldn't risk letting word of my problems get out in the capital or even if you put things right the information delay between problem and resolution would still end up costing me thousands of crowns on the cargo markets. I've already lost one galleon and a coaster on the run, and those losses are substantial enough without adding consequential damages on top of them."

Lillet wasn't sure that she appreciated the point, but she supposed that merchants would almost always consider money to be their primary concern.

"In any case, we're here now," she said, "so go on. You say that two of your ships have been sunk?"

"That's right. I'll start with a little background. In order to ship goods for Vesper in the Illyrian League, it's generally necessary to either travel overland, to sail across the Bay of Drawn Swords from Triamelle to Marsden or Vendrick, or to take the long sea route to Brinton around the Horn. The bay route is shorter, but it risks Lusatian pirates as well as possible Illyrian privateers if tensions are up in the League cities; that's how it got its name, from all the sea battles fought there over the years. But about eight years back, I obtained accurate charts of a route through the Horn Rocks, which lets my ships use Mistral as their home port in Charente instead of Triamelle, avoid most of the Bay, and still reach Vendrick in the same timeframe, or shave whole days of travel off the trip if Brinton is the destination port. That route is probably the single most important reason that my ships have been able to give the fastest, cheapest service to and from Illyria and has made me a fortune.

"Unluckily, during the past month, good fortune has turned its back on me. First it was the sloop _Swiftsure_. It left Vendrick with a full cargo hold and was found adrift at sea on this side of the Horn five days after it was supposed to arrive in Mistral. Every crew member was missing, vanished off the ship as if they'd been snatched in the middle of whatever task they were doing. There was even food half-cooked in the galley, the stove left for its fire to burn out."

"Could it have been pirates?" Lillet asked. "The crew would naturally drop everything to repel a sudden attack," she added when Limoux's face began to fall.

"Ah, I see. That's true enough, but there was no sign of a battle having taken place: no damage to the ship or the sails, no spilled blood, no signs of violence at all. Then, of course, there was the most telling point of all: the _Swiftsure_'s cargo was entirely intact. Not that it did me any good; the cargo went to the finders by the law of salvage and I had to pay the prize value just to get the ship back. But as for the crew's disappearance, it was a complete mystery."

"You said that you lost two ships, though."

"That's right. A week later, the coaster _Molly May_ was late arriving despite clear skies. She was found by the _Gannett_, fetched up on the shores of the Lesser Horn, broken in pieces. All of her crew was missing, and from what we could tell, the cargo had been left intact just like the _Swiftsure_'s, though of course a fair amount of it had been lost to the waves in the wreck. It was clear that the _Swiftsure_'s survival had been largely a matter of luck; like the _Molly May_ she'd simply sailed on, crewless, and by some chance of wind and current had happened to find open water. That report we only have because the _Gannett_'s captain sent three crew in her skiff back to Vendrick with the news. The _Gannett_ herself went on…and met the same fate as the _Molly May_."

"So, something is coming on board your ships, plucking away their crews without any warning or struggle, then just letting the ships drift away as they might, without any mind to the cargo?" Lillet summed up. "I can see why you wanted a magician to investigate. That can't possibly be natural."

"I'm glad that you agree, Mistress Blan. I could imagine it happening once—a heavily armed pirate vessel, perhaps with magic support, might have coerced the crew of a small ship like the _Swiftsure_ or the _Molly May_ to abandon their vessel by a show of force, then by some error of seamanship been forced to let it drift away, but the _Gannett_ was a heavily armed galleon. She even carried a hedge-wizard on board; obviously they'd have nothing like the power of a Royal Magician like yourself, but magic would certainly make a difference."

"And then, there's the question of the cargoes," Lillet said. "No pirate, or even some enemy of yours or a political rival of the cities you deal with, would just leave all that wealth behind, would they? If they were after money, they'd take money, and if they had some other scheme, I'd think they'd take the money _anyway_ just to hide the fact that greed wasn't their aim."

"It doesn't feel human," Amoretta agreed. "It seems much more like it's some kind of monster, that wants the crew as prey and doesn't care about the ships and cargoes at all."

"Right, and that doesn't know or care about human motives that might make it want to hide its actions." Lillet tapped a fingertip against her lips as she thought it over. "That rules out any kind of devil, don't you think? The ones who aren't smart enough to conceal what they're up to are violent brutes, incapable of being subtle in their destruction."

Amoretta nodded firmly.

"I agree. Devils definitely aren't _detached_ from human sins in this way. They're a corrupt mirror of the human perspective."

"And I think we can rule out Alchemy for the same reason: to have alchemical creations, there would have to be a magician to create them. The creations themselves might ignore the cargoes, but they'd just be tools of the master—sorry, Amoretta."

"Why are you apologizing? Dr. Chartreuse made me for a purpose, after all. I'm well aware of that."

She wasn't chiding Lillet; by her tone of voice she was genuinely confused as to why Lillet would apologize. _That's so like her_, Lillet thought. The homunculus always had had difficulty with concepts like tact, and even if she might have learned to moderate her own speech when the social graces suggested that a blunt truth wasn't called for, she would never be offended at someone else being rude to her so long as the rudeness was honest.

Amoretta probably hadn't even noticed that what Lillet had said might have been insensitive to say in front of a homunculus, let alone thought to be upset by it.

Limoux's eyebrows had gone up at the word "made," but he said nothing, doubtless having his own problems on his mind. Lillet had a feeling that he had filed the remark away for later, though—the master merchant gathering information reflexively in the event that it might become useful to him in the future.

"That just leaves Necromancy and Glamour. I wish that I knew more about stories of sea monsters; I don't have as much grounding in that area as I do in other magic." She bit her lip. "I really wish you had told Master Freixenet what this was about in advance, Mr. Limoux. He could have assigned an expert in oceanic magic to help you, or at least have given me time to research this situation. The thing is that most of the sea monsters I've heard of, like scyllas and sea serpents, attack by force. A serpent might destroy the ship and the crew like a marauding dragon, but not like this. Even ghosts would leave _some_ trail."

"Do you or the crew have any ideas?" Amoretta asked. "Seafarers would have a better idea what kind of hazards there are at sea, even if only as stories instead of as accurate and tested research."

Limoux shook his head.

"I certainly don't. Believe me, if I did, I'd happily be more specific."

"What about the crew, then?" Lillet asked. "If rumors spread in a port anything like they do in a village, they'll probably have heard something about what's going on, and have their own ideas. They might not have any academic magical knowledge, but in my experience there's a lot of good sense embedded in folk wisdom and superstition, if you look at it with a critical eye."

"I don't want to start a panic on board, though."

"They probably know already. If anything, I bet the reason that they're not grumbling and protesting about sailing a 'cursed route' is because you're here with them. Either they assume you wouldn't be here unless you knew it was safe, or they think you're here taking the risk alongside them and they respect you for it."

"I see…" He stroked his beard, thinking it over. "Still and all…"

"Why don't you start with the officers?" Amoretta suggested. "They might have ideas, and they ought to know if there's been any talk among the crew."

"That's a very good point, Miss Virgine. Captain Pouillac already is in my confidence, and he's a good judge of his crew. As Mistress Blan says, there's no hard in asking the sailors directly _if_ they already know some of what's happened."

"Meanwhile, I'll look through Neptune to see if there are any suggestions there. It's a Glamour grimoire, so the kind of think causing the incidents might even be a summonable familiar, or it might be discussed as a problem that some Rune in the grimoire is designed to protect against." She undid the satchel's buckle.

"Then I'll leave you ladies to it, and let you know if I hear anything." Limoux rose from the table and headed for the cabin door.

"Why don't you go with him, Amoretta?" Lillet said as he left. "Since you have magical knowledge, you'll do a better job of translating rumor into detail and realizing what might be important, and you can remember the exact wording of what people say in case Mr. Limoux forgets."

"All right."

She pushed back her chair, but there was a frown on her face as she did.

"Lillet…" she began.

"Yes? What's wrong?"

"I don't think it's right, what Mr. Limoux did."

Lillet also frowned. It took only a moment's thought before she believed she understood what her lover was talking about.

"I agree with you. I assume you mean that he's sailing this ship deliberately on a route where three other vessels have had their crews vanish, with me on board to try and magically fight off whatever is happening so he assumes that it will happen again, but only officially told the captain about it."

"That's right. It's one thing for him to risk his own life for his own sake, or for him to ask us, as a Royal Magician and apprentice, to face danger."

"It's part of our job," Lillet agreed. "Although knowing what we do now, part of me wished that you were safe at home. I can't be sure that I can keep you safe from a threat that I can't even identify. This isn't like at the Tower, when I could just let time turn back if I failed until I got it right."

"Lillet, don't worry." Amoretta set her hand on Lillet's shoulder, and Lillet leaned in, resting her cheek up against it, feeling the comforting coolness of her skin. "If anyone can do this, then it's definitely you. Not just for me, but for the sake of all those sailors who didn't know they were risking their lives to come on this voyage."

Her mentioning the additional responsibility was not exactly comforting, but the casual confidence she showed in Lillet's ability to handle the situation was.

There was a lot to be said for having the faith of one's best beloved one.

"Thanks, Amoretta. I'll do my best."

"I know you will. I'd better get going, if I'm going to help."

"All right. I'll see you soon."

Amoretta left, and Lillet set the grimoire down on the table. Colored the bright green of Glamour, its binding had a scalloped pattern that reminded Lillet of fish scales, and a trident was inlaid in gold leaf on the spine and front cover alike. The book was clearly a presentation copy, prepared more to sit on a library shelf than as a working volume, but that its contents had been reviewed and verified as accurate by the library staff was all that Lillet cared for.

"Well," she said aloud, "let's see what you have to offer."


	2. Chapter 2

Often, studying grimoires would trigger flashes of memory and understanding in Lillet. It was all on account of the twisted history of her time at the Silver Star Tower. She'd spent literal _centuries_ reliving the same five days over and over, studying every book of magic to be found in the greatest magic library in the kingdom, but thanks to the way the Philosopher's Stone warped time, she only carried with her the memories of the final five cycles.

That magic, though, learned through impossible lifetimes, even over multiple simultaneous existences in some cases, all remained engraved on her soul. It was for that reason that she'd been able to pick up masterwork grimoires and be summoning dragons immediately, or deciphering in hours forgotten Runes that would take ordinary magicians days, or even months, not because she was some kind of genius but because she'd _already learned it_.

Neptune, though, did not provoke that kind of reaction, that instantaneous familiarity that signaled a memory carried in the soul. Oh, she was at ease with the basic symbolism and structure of the Runes; her fundamental technical knowledge of Glamour, especially, was superior even to that of Professor Gammel. But these were Runes she hadn't cast over and over again in the forgotten time now known only to God. The magic of the ocean hadn't been of use in dealing with a landlocked tower and she'd probably only looked it a handful of times, if that.

And the problem was, from what she could see, it was exactly as she'd said to Limoux: the monsters of the sea were powerful, but destructively so. A great serpent might crush a ship in its coils or shatter it with magical lightning, but it wouldn't beckon the crew to just abandon the shop, to walk off the side. And even if something _could_ do that to a crewman, how could it affect all of them at once, so that none would leave any kind of record, or fight to restrain their fellows?

_If only I'd had time to research this properly!_ She cursed Limoux's secrecy and the greed that drove him to maintain it. Just like he'd unjustly exposed the _St. Julien_'s crew to danger, he'd impaired Lillet's chances of success, even putting _his own_ life at greater risk, solely for the purpose of hedging his profits on the financial markets.

But there was no point in cursing him now. Frustrating as it might have been, it was nevertheless the hand that she had been dealt—that they all had, Lillet and Amoretta and the ship's crew and even Limoux himself, for whatever risks he'd forced on other people he at least had been willing to face them himself. That was a lot of faith to put in a magician he'd never met.

And for all their sakes, Lillet needed to live up to that faith.

_But what was it?_ What creature of the sea—

_Wait._

Those ships hadn't been attacked on the high seas, but while making their way through a channel between islands, navigating among ragged, rocky shores and hidden reefs and sandbars. They were in range of land throughout. Was there an answer to be found there?

Lillet shook her head. Oh, it opened the door for more possibilities, different kinds of creatures, but it still didn't answer the main issue: how had something managed to get entire crews to leave their ship, without them leaving any trace? And not just once, but three times running, so that the trick was repeatable.

"So it can't rely on chance," she said aloud, thinking it through. Nothing like bribing the crew—all it would take was one dissenter to ruin the game. Besides, if a business rival was out to ruin Limoux that way, it would make more sense to simply buy the secret of his route through the Horn Rocks instead of staging such an elaborate charade. Good planners didn't burden themselves with excessive complexity and theatricality, and _if_ there was a human planner behind these disappearances they were by definition good just to have pulled it off.

So no, that was out, or at least highly unlikely. Which was too bad, because the easiest way to explain the crews' disappearances was that they'd abandoned ship of their own free will. If it were only a single incident, Lillet would definitely have concentrated her efforts along those lines. But three times? That made no sense. And violence hadn't been used, nor likely the threat of violence or someone would have left a message—or the _Gannett_'s crew, knowing of the _Molly May_'s fate, would have fought back simply because they'd have known the threatener was untrustworthy.

That just brought her back around to magic. There were magical ways to subdue a person without violence. A grimalkin was a relatively basic Sorcery familiar, for example, capable of magically putting a person or even a powerful magical creature to sleep. There were even familiars capable of taking over a person's body and puppeting it even though the person's mind was still conscious. But that was one person. Whatever effect had struck, it had to affect the entire crew _at once_. It wasn't a case of, say, a half-dozen grimalkin prowling the ship and putting crew members to sleep as they met them. That would leave too much time for people to act, and even futile resistance would leave traces that a merchant very, very interested in what had become of his employees and his money would not have missed seeing.

So, what could affect an entire ship at once? It couldn't be something like a flock of harpies descending from above and snatching people, since there'd always be someone below decks.

_The air, maybe?_ Lillet's imagination conjured the vision for her, a large cloud of mist or smoke that filled the air, that a ship on a fixed course through the channel had to sail through, imagining it an ordinary fogbank until it was too late, and the crew were dropping off to sleep, so that they could be removed. But why remove them? A creature that could create such a field of mist would be too big to go through the ship, carefully removing people, and if it had been a human agent—say, using Alchemy of the type that might be put into play among armies—it put Lillet right back at the beginning, with questions of motive that had led her, and Limoux, to shy away from the idea of a human agency. But she was on the right track, she thought, with the idea of something that could affect the entire crew at once. Perhaps not breathed, but—

Lillet sat bolt upright in her seat. Scraps of a half-remembered story flitted through the edges of her mind, just out of reach.

_Something I'd read? A story I heard once? A casual mention by someone at the Royal House of Magic?_

She couldn't be sure of exactly how she'd heard it, but she did have it, that faint memory of something that might answer all the conditions of the riddle. Lillet snatched up her books and darted out of the cabin, down the short passageway and out on deck.

"Mr. Limoux! Amoretta!"

Lillet frantically scanned the deck, looking for either of them. She didn't see them at first and wondered if they'd gone below to talk to any of the crew down there, but then she turned around and saw the broad figure of Limoux in his distinctive bottle-green coat with gold braid and trim, standing next to the helm. Lillet darted up the companionway to the quarterdeck and saw that the merchant was apparently speaking with the helmsman, while a ship's officer stood not far away. Amoretta was there, too, the slight girl having been blocked at first from Lillet's sight by Limoux.

She'd seen something more ominous as she looked around, though. The setting, the scenery, had changed in the time she'd been below, poring over her book and wrestling with the problem. The sun had dipped quite a bit lower in the sky, indicating that hours had passed, while instead of being surrounded by the open sea, there were bare walls of jagged, black stone rising up to all sides, the cliffs of the Horn Rocks.

"Sirens!" she burst out, rushing up to Amoretta and Limoux. They turned, startled by her sudden arrival, as did the mate and the helmsman.

"Lillet?"

"Sirens!" Lillet repeated. "I don't know much about them, but they're supposed to be beautiful mermaid creatures whose song enchants anyone who hears it. Song! The effect could cover the whole ship at once, and it would subdue the crew without a fight."

"Aye, I've heard such tales," the helmsman said. "Fairer than any maiden—beggin' yer pardon, Mistress—but they'll drag yer off ter th' depths."

"Yes, of course, the old Illyrian myth-tales," the mate contributed, snapping his fingers to punctuate. "We read them at school, when we were being tutored in Old Achaean."

The mate, it was clear, had come from an upper-class family that had afforded him access to a private school. Lillet had been taught at the village school, and classical literature and language had not been on the syllabus.

"Of course!" Limoux agreed. "Iason, wasn't it? Or perhaps it was one of the Dire Tasks? But I thought those were just stories, myths from long-lost pagan times."

Lillet shook her head.

"There's a lot of truth embedded in those old myths. Although the technical details tend to become obscured either to make for a better story or to teach the audience a lesson, they tend to be based upon real encounters with magical creatures, ghosts, or devils. It's the same with a number of fairy tales."

"The Sirens were said to be so alluring that their music charmed the hearts of every man on the ship," the mate said. "According to the story, the crew would just walk off the ship into their arms."

"It's good that our magician is a woman, then," Limoux said, grinning broadly.

"Um, there's two problems with that, Mr. Limoux. Between three whole crews, I think it's very likely that there was at least one man who wasn't attracted to women, but they were all taken anyway. I don't think that whatever effect their song has is limited to those who'd normally be attracted—or maybe there are male sirens, too? And even if that wasn't true, well…"

She reached out and took Amoretta's hand.

"Oh."

"How did they stop the sirens in the story?" Amoretta asked the mate. He rubbed his chin, thinking it over.

"I don't entirely remember, but…I think they stopped up their ears with wax? Except the captain, who tied himself to the mast so he couldn't run off to them. The crew knew they were past the danger and could take the wax out when he stopped trying to fight his way loose."

"That could work! If the magic works via the sense of hearing, then stopping us from hearing it would prevent it from taking hold."

"Right. Mr. Cahors, break out the candles and start distributing plugs to the men," Limoux instructed the mate. "I'll tell Captain Pouillac so that he can verify the orders." Even though Limoux owned the ship, by the law of the sea the captain had near-absolute authority until they reached harbor.

"All right, but we have to be careful. There are places where we _can't_ run the channel without being able to give and hear orders in a precise, timely fashion," Cahors said. "So much as thirty seconds' delay could end with the keel torn out on a reef and us wishing the monsters got us instead of the water."

Hearing that, Lillet could appreciate how it was that the route was worth so much to Limoux. If it needed that level of precision to navigate, it was something no competitor was going to be able to match. _No wonder he's going to such lengths to protect it._

"Better to face the risk of a shipwreck than the certainty of our fate if we're taken," he told the mate. Cahors nodded, and headed down towards the main deck at once. To Lillet, Limoux continued, "Are you certain that this is what's been attacking my ship?"

Lillet shook her head.

"No, I'm not. This is just the only thing that I can think of that fits the facts. I wish I had access to the library so that we could have the truth about sirens and not just myth and rumor. Then, maybe we could be sure."

Limoux gnawed at the end of his moustache, a nervous habit doubtless left over from his younger days when presentation of a well-groomed appearance wasn't so important to him from a business standpoint.

"I hope you're right, then, because if the crew can't handle the helm and sails with precise timing in the Seven-Crag Slot then this ship will—"

He didn't get a chance to offer a take on their potential fate, because at that moment they could hear a high, lilting song ring out.

The song had no words, just a soaring melody that rang with the heartbreaking beauty of crystal chimes. Beneath it wove in choral harmony a deep, throaty under-layer that throbbed along the nerves. While the soprano voices called to exaltation, to elevation and glory, the altos were rich and sensual, tempting the body on the basest level. All across the main deck, the crew were standing awestruck. Lines and halyards slipped from slack hands, motion froze in mid-step, and rapt faces turned towards the nearest rail, looking out to sea.

They were emerging on all sides. Some surfaced within the water itself. Others pulled themselves up onto rocks, a few even on the jagged stones that were the forbidding shores of nearby islets. They were alluring temptresses, with curved, rosy flesh clad in nothing but sea-foam, _so that their iridescent scales could scatter the sunlight in rainbow showers._ Lillet's flesh burned to be caressed by long, agile fingers _tipped with hooked claws, webwork spreading between the fingers._ She ached to be kissed by soft, crimson, honey-sweet lips _that parted to reveal rows of razor-sharp serrated teeth._

She clutched at her head, the cascade of conflicting imagery barraging her. _It's the wards_, she thought, the clarity an effort. Her defensive charms were fighting the effects of the siren-song like they would any hostile magic. The warping sight was the effect of the illusions the enchantment were trying to make her see—to _feel_—fighting against the reality.

It was a fight they were losing.

She dropped to her knees on the deck, fumbling for her grimoire, but she knew it was hopeless. Her vision was swimming as the spell fought to control her. Lillet could never manage the concentration necessary to accurately draw the Rune—particularly one from Neptune that she hadn't cast dozens or hundreds of times before—let alone the focus needed to kindle the Rune with mana, not while reality itself was shifting and twisting around her, constantly in flux.

She needed magic to break the spell, but only by breaking the song's spell could she cast magic. It was a hopeless situation.

_No, not "spell," _she thought. _Not "enchantment," _even though it was. _Song. Siren song. Not break a spell, silence a song._

"Amoretta!" she cried out. Her homunculus lover was only a couple of feet away from her, wasn't she? Or was it a hundred miles? "Sing counterpoint!"

Lillet didn't know if it was any use, if Amoretta could even hear her or if she was as lost as the crew; she couldn't see and the world was dissolving into clouds and sea-foam as her battered wards began to fail and—

And then reality returned, hard and sharp. The sand-scrubbed planks of the deck, the cold sea-spray, the shifting wind that fought its way through the rocky channel, every sensation clear-minted and bright in her mind. Maybe it was Amoretta's own wards, lovingly set by Lillet to help keep her true heart safe, or perhaps it was that Amoretta was a creation of Alchemy, inherently resistant to the magic of Glamour that had to follow the patterns of nature instead of using its laws as it wilt.

Either way, though, she'd heard Lillet's desperate cry, and it was there, that beautiful angel's voice, rising up in precise, purposed vocalizations that slid into the siren-song and changed it, undercut it, stole away the greatest weight of its power. The sirens' voices were magically beautiful, impossibly beyond human, and yet Amoretta's shone through all of them, a golden thread of perfection woven into the song that reshaped it entirely. Lillet could still feel the pressure of the song against her consciousness, but it was a weak thing, a headache from reading too long into the night rather than a migrane. Across the deck, men staggered, shaking their heads or clutching at them, fighting off the effects but still somewhat under their influence, since they lacked Lillet's protections and had been completely under the force of the song.

"Sing!" Lillet called to them. "Lift your voices and give them a song of your own!"

"Aye, me hearties!" roared a crewman with a red bandanna tied around his head and massive shoulders—the bosun, Lillet thought, remembering how he'd barked orders when they set sail. "Sing out, every man-jack of you!"

In the next moment he put action behind his words and lent his rich baritone to a rousing, upbeat chantey. The song was funny, vulgar, and a bit profane, and Lillet had a feeling he'd picked it precisely because of that, a worldly song by sailors cast back in the teeth of the sirens' inhuman mystery. In the next few moments, voice after voice joined in, and each new crew member singing blunted the effect of the siren song even more.

They might have sailed past that way, escaped the sirens' clutches with the combined power of their voices, but Lillet had a job to do. Her mission was not to protect the _St. Julien_, but to stop the problem. The next ship to pass would be attacked by these monsters, and the next, and the next.

She flipped the Neptune grimoire to the correct page and began to draw. In two verses she had the basic structure of the Rune traced out on the deck with her wand. In another verse it was kindled with mana, bright and shining with the green light of Glamour. This wasn't the rich, verdant green of the deep forest that most Glamour runes shone with, though. Rather, it was an appropriately aqueous light, tinted with the blue of a tropical lagoon, and in its radiance it seemed like fish swam and danced, circling the upraised trident that represented pagan sea-gods.

Lillet did not stop there, but continued to pour mana into the Rune, awakening deeper powers. This was not merely a rote chore, like adding a second layer of bricks atop a first. Rather, it demanded that the magician understand the symbolism of the Rune, to mentally guide the flow of mana in particular ways to give shape to their will. This was why advanced versions of Runes required weeks, months, even years of study, why an apprentice who could cast a basic Fairy Ring couldn't just bring forth astral Fairies right away.

Neptune wasn't a Rune that Lillet knew by heart. But what made her a great magician, a match even for the Archmage, wasn't just experience with particular castings but her knowledge of fundamental principles, her ability to grasp how Runes were put together. She might not have known Neptune in the depths of her soul, but understanding each step, following the logic of the pattern to the effects desired, _that_ she was able to do at little more than a glance.

By the time the chantey ended and the sailors had switched to the highly colorful legends of Black Jack Bergerac, the Rune shone like a beacon from the quarterdeck. The sirens sang on, their magic clawing at the edge of Lillet's awareness, but the hearty tune helped drown the lure, and somehow through it all the pure sweetness of Amoretta's voice continued to ring out, deftly matching the monsters in their musical duel even as the sirens tried to shake her off, shifting their melody, harmony, even pitch with a musical deftness even the greatest orchestra on the continent could only hope to achieve.

And then the summon answered Lillet's call.

Ordinarily, it would have lurked beneath the waves, struck from below, but the channel they were in was far too shallow to contain it. The massive wedge-shaped body reared in the air, towering high above the galleon's masts, its eyes alone a dozen feet across at the least. Ten massive arms, whipcord tentacles of thick muscle, lashed out at their designated prey.

The kraken's arms could have coiled around the _St. Julien_ and crushed the ship to splinters if it had wanted. The sirens stood no chance at all. Their song fell silent as they were snatched up, some crushed at once, others pulled beneath the water that mercifully hid the sight of them being pulled to the kraken's beak and consumed. The illusion was broken, leaving only the scaled fish-creatures fleeing in terror, scattering in all directions in their attempts to escape.

Lillet felt a pang of sympathy at the sirens' plight as they desperately tried to flee their doom or bit and clawed at the kraken's arms in a futile defiance. She didn't like causing anything to feel that kind of horror, not even monsters. But she did not relent. The sirens had in their turn attacked the crews of at least three ships and carried them off to become food for their rapacious appetites. There was nothing innocent about them, and they did not somehow gain moral license just because their intended victims had brought overwhelming force _this_ time.

The crew, who weren't the ones bringing that force, had no such quandary. They cheered lustily as the monsters who'd wanted to overwhelm their minds, then devour them, were struck down, though more than a few kept a nervous eye on the kraken, not _entirely_ certain of whether it truly was on their side (or under control).

In a frighteningly short time, though, it was over, the siren-song stilled and none of the monsters left in sight. To be certain, Lillet summoned a pair of the Rune's lesser familiars, full-sized seahorses called hippocampi, and sent them patrolling out underwater, using their clairvoyant-like sonar to explore the channel and make certain that none of the sirens had escaped and were lurking, ready to strike back.

She gave a deep sigh of relief when they found nothing, and dismissed her familiars back to the eternal deeps of Faerie where they made their natural homes.

"That was well-done, Lillet."

"Amoretta?"

The homunculus laid a gentle hand on Lillet's shoulder.

"They were monsters, not people, even though they looked humanoid. I don't know if they even have intelligence, but if they do, then they made a choice, and the consequences are theirs to receive."

_She knew._

Lillet sighed, then took Amoretta's hand in her own and pressed it against her cheek. The homunculus's skin was cool and dry and felt good, Lillet being flushed from the magical exertion. The comfort her touch brought, though, was far more than physical.

She'd understood at once what Lillet had been feeling, the conflicting emotions, and had acted at once to put her own weight on the balance.

"Thank you, little love. I tried to tell myself that, but hearing it from you carries so much more weight."

"You saved all of us, Lillet, and not just us but the crews of any other ships that might follow."

"Only because _you_ saved us all first. That was amazing, how you were able to match and counter their song."

"I never would have thought of it, not until you called out. I don't even know how you knew that I could."

"I didn't! It was just the only thing that came to me, that, well, you have the most amazing voice I've ever heard and that you might be able to oppose theirs. I'm glad that it worked."

All around them, the crew was getting back to work, hauling lines, shifting sail, and beginning to measure out the careful navigation they'd have to take to get through the upcoming sections of the channel. It was almost as if the attack had never happened, the only lingering traces being in the minds of those who'd gone through it.

"I'm glad, too. And Master Freixenet will be very happy with you, too, for dealing with the problem with no further loss of life or even damage to the ship."

"That's true. _And_ it wouldn't have worked if you hadn't come along, so I even have the perfect answer if anyone makes any snide comments about this job being an excuse to take a sea vacation with my beloved."

"But now that we're done with work, it _can_ be that."

"True! But after this experience, little love…"

"Yes?" Amoretta prompted.

"As much as I dislike travel by dragonback, I'll be just as happy to fly home from Vendrick!"


End file.
